The present disclosure generally relates to compilers, and more particularly to providing a visual output associated with a compilation process.
Instructions for a programmable processor may be stored in a form that is directly executable by the processor (“object” or “executable” form), or the instructions may be stored in a human-readable text form called “source code” that can be automatically processed by a development tool commonly known as a “compiler” to produce executable code. The compiler may be used to develop the source code and ensure that it executes properly.
A compiler translates an input program written in a programming language into an equivalent program in another language. In particular, the compiler takes a program written in a high-level programming language as input and translates the program into an equivalent program in a low-level language such as machine language or assembly language. The program written in the high-level language may be referred to as the source program, and the program converted into the low-level language may be referred to as the object (or target) program. After compilation of the source program, the target program may be loaded into memory for execution. The compilation process has many phases and debugging a compiler may be time consuming.